RECIPES & REVIEWS: 5/13/25
MISS BETTY/MISS FLANNERY CINNAMON/MAPLE SYRUP CAKE, IRIS MURDOCH, "ETOILE"/"SLINGS & ARROWS," AND HOW TO RESPOND WHEN SOMEBODY YOU RESPECT CALLS YOU A FASCIST
Above are photos of Flannery O’Connor and Betty Hester. They were epistolary soulmates, as was Hester with Iris Murdoch. Who was Hester? And how did I come to name this cake below for Flannery and her, the former a brilliant southern writer (although Murdoch, technically an atheist, didn’t think so when at Hester’s behest she read a bit of O’Connor’s fiction saturated with all that cantankerous Catholicism that clicked its wafer-laden tongue so seriously at the Southern Gothicism that gave it all a hum of humor along with that needed stench of human breath such wafers finally could not stanch) and the needy, knowledgeable lesbian office clerk from Atlanta who held both these female authors in the anticipatory thrall of receiving her letters?
Keep reading.
And watching the two videos I am posting about it all.
(Above: Iris Murdoch in 1972 photographed by Cecil Beaton. The National Portrait Gallery London.)
But first.
An explanation.
I don’t feel comfortable commandeering the communal kitchen in order to bake here in Porto at the townhouse where my Airbnb rooms are located because baking takes up more time and space than just cooking a quick dinner of salmon and asparagus sautéed in olive oil along with all the garlic I’ve diced up. Kinda like all the time and space atheism takes up in its proselytizing explanations we tell one another about its being the correct choice in our lives as opposed to the simpler cleaner surrender that doubt takes which is the basis of the faith that enables me to talk to God in the silence where I sit beneath a tree that is not there to do so.
“The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion,” wrote the Platonist Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good . “Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. 'Good is a transcendent reality' means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.”
Or as O’Connor’s titled one of her stories: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
The cake above is from another Betty’s recipe, one named Crocker. I baked it a few years ago back in Hudson, New York, and made a couple of videos about it. It was delicious. My lack of time and space in Porto gave me an excuse - a good one which I was trying to find - to do a deep dive into Betty Hester and Flannery O’Connor and discover as well today the Iris Murdoch connection, and to use this cake as the recipe part of this week’s column in this continuing series.
Here’s Part One of the video I made back when I was trying to find some goodness in me the day I was baking this cake, the act of baking and trying to find it a kind of goodness itself that did not have to reside inside me. It could keep me company in my search for a it, the conundrum that both Murdoch and O’Connor sentenced themselves to live within as writers and seekers and which, I think, attracted them to the conundrum of Betty Hester herself who finally couldn’t live with what resided within her and took her own life the day after Christmas in 1998.
[FOR THE RECIPE AND PART TWO OF THE VIDEO IN WHICH SWEET MATTY SWEEPS IN AND MAKES A GUEST APPEARANCE AND TO READ MORE ABOUT FLANNERY AND BETTY AND IRIS AND WHAT FLANNERY HAD TO SAY ABOUT BEING ACCUSED OF BEING A FASCIST BY BETTY, PLEASE BECOME PART OF OUR PAID SUBSCRIBER COMMUNITY FOR ONLY $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. OH, AND I ALSO REVIEW ETOILE AND SLINGS & ARROWS. THANKS. YOUR SUPPORT MEANS A LOT. ]